Sunrise started as an experiment and ended up the failed sort.

I had been working on Project After Life for six months and needed to pull back and let that story rest. For some time I had been trying to work on my process and refine it. With After Life on hold, I decided it was a great time to go as outside the box as I could, and see if I was locking myself into a routine that wasn’t as efficient and helpful as it could be.

My projects start with the plot. However much I wish I could start with characters, they are the aspect of my novels that I have to discover- more or less- as I go. So the bones of the structure is what I figure out first.

I also outline. Extensively. An outline that is between 25k to 50k+ is typically my standard, because it’s one of the parts of writing that I truly, deeply love. Generally, because of this, I give myself a month to outline before I call it, or I would never get to the drafting stage.

My stories are not typically character-driven stories either. We’re not just living with them and growing with as they go through everyday life. There are defined goals, important tasks, and high stakes.

I also have a preferred genre I write in and certain elements I love to explore and do so often.

So, enter Sunrise.

I decided, after a spark of an idea came in August, to start this new project and do it in a completely different way. Firstly, I was not going to outline extensively. I wasn’t going to have a big overarching plot. It wasn’t going to be dark but fluffy. I was going to have this be a character-driven story.

In hindsight, after getting to just before the midpoint, I had realized that I had most definitely changed too much of my process for this to ever have a chance of succeeding.

How can I have a character-driven story when, not only did I not really know the plot because I didn’t create one, but also not know the characters, since I discover them along the way? It made for a meandering, convoluted story about uninteresting people who I knew nothing about and that did nothing because there was genuinely nothing to do. A frustrating mess for us all.

All that in mind, and though it was shelved in mid-October, it’s not gone for good. So many small things added up into something that I actually like, I just need to sort out and execute properly, in the way I enjoy and am best at. It may be technically a bit of a failure but I’ve learned a lot from Sunrise! I think the best experiments end up that way. I’m looking forward to trying this one out again and changing it from a failed experiment to a completed novel.